Quotable Mathematics

"On the most usual assumption, the universe is homogeneous on the large scale, i. e. down to regions containing each an appreciable num...

"It is an outcome of faith that nature - as she is perceptible to our five senses - takes the character of such a well formulated puzzl...

"A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. [...]. The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or ...

"A reality completely independent of the spirit that conceives it, sees it, or feels it, is an impossibility. A world so external as th...

"Beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not...

"The ideas imprinted on the senses by the Author of Nature are called real things: and those excited in the imagination being less regu...

"Metaphysical inquiry attempts to trace things to the very first stage in which they can, even to the most penetrating intelligences, b...

"All experience attests the strength of the tendency to mistake mental abstractions, even negative ones, for substantive realities; and...

"[...] according to the quantum theory, randomness is a basic trait of reality, whereas in classical physics it is a derivative propert...

"To say that a thing is imaginary is not to dispose of it in the realm of mind, for the imagination, or the image making faculty, is a ...

"Today’s quarks and leptons can be viewed as metaphors of the underlying reality of nature, though metaphors that are objectively and r...

"New metaphors are capable of creating new understandings and, therefore, new realities. This should be obvious in the case of poetic m...

"For some years now the activity of the artist in our society has been trending more toward the function of the ecologist: one who deal...